The Harder They Come (26 page)

S
HE WAS AT THE
stove two days later, making a pot of low-cal chicken vegetable soup (tenders sautéed in safflower oil with garlic and onions, chicken stock, zucchini, tomatoes and snow peas from her garden), late afternoon, a glass of zinfandel on the counter beside her, everything as still as still can be. Kutya was asleep on the floor, in the cool place by the sink. A faint breeze, just the breath of one, came in through the screen windows. Quartering the tomatoes and dicing the zucchini, occasionally taking a sip of wine and gazing idly out the window to where the hummingbirds were buzzing each other off the feeder, she felt herself easing into a kind of waking dream, and wasn’t this the way life was supposed to be? No worries. Just living in the moment. Normally she would have been listening to the radio, but she’d spun through the dial twice and there was nothing but crap on—classical, with the stick-up-the-ass announcers who sounded as if they’d had all their blood drained out of them the minute they turned the microphone on; Mexican talk; Mexican music; Mexican car ads; classic rock with the same playlist they’d been rehashing for the last half century and, if you didn’t like that, the alt rock that was such crap even the musicians’ mothers couldn’t take it—and so she was listening to the house breathing around her, to the jay outside the window and the neat controlled tap and release of the blade on the cutting board.

She hadn’t heard from Christabel since the night before last, since their fight, if you could call it that, but what best friends didn’t fight once in a while? You weren’t really close with somebody unless you could let it all hang out—that was what intimacy was all about, going deep, getting under each other’s skin, taking the good with
the bad. That was what she was thinking, elevating the edge of the cutting board now to guide the zucchini and tomatoes into the pot and wondering if she had any mushrooms left in the refrigerator because mushrooms would give the soup a little more density and add a nice subtle flavor—the creminis, the chewy ones—when the strangest feeling came over her, almost as if a ghost had materialized in the room behind her, and that was even stranger, because she didn’t believe in ghosts. She believed in graves, six feet down, and the spirit trapped in the body. That rotted.

Still, she couldn’t help turning her head to look over her shoulder as the steam from the pot rose around her and the garlic sent up its aroma to sweeten the room, but there was nothing there. The strangest thing—she’d have to tell Christabel about it. To the refrigerator—yes, there were the creminis—and then to the sink to rinse them and again to the cutting board. Then the feeling came back, stronger now, and she turned around again and there he was, Adam, standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, trying to smile. “Adam,” she said, naming him, just that, but she was soaring inside.

He was in his fatigues, the knife strapped at his side, his boots scuffed, his face and scalp tanned as deeply as any lifeguard’s. Behind him, in the hallway that led to the living room, she could see the dark mound of his discarded pack and the thin shadow of the rifle leaning up against the wall. The dog, too lazy and spoiled to do his job properly, lifted his head suddenly, gave a soft woof and trotted over to him. Adam hadn’t moved or said a word, but now he reached behind him, ignoring Kutya, who was wagging his tail in recognition and sniffing at his pantleg, and produced a plastic Ziploc bag that seemed to contain a dark smear of something that might have been chocolate but wasn’t. “I got the shits,” he announced.

She was going to ask if he was hungry, if he wanted a glass of wine, if he’d been out there camping in the woods all this time (the answer to that was obvious, just from a glance at him), but
instead she said, “You need Pepto-Bismol? I’ve got those little pink tabs, I think, and maybe a bottle too.” She looked at him dubiously. His pants were stained. He’d lost weight. She could smell him from all the way across the room.

He didn’t answer, just repeated himself: “I got the shits.”

“Or maybe something stronger? Imodium? I think I might have some in the medicine cabinet . . .” And she started for the bathroom but he just reached out and grabbed hold of her in his arms that were like steel cables and pressed her to him, hard, so hard it was as if he never wanted to let go, and then he was kissing her, the plastic bag flapping behind her so that she could feel the inflexible zippered edge of it digging into her where her pants pulled away from her blouse, and she held on to him just as tightly and kissed him back with everything she had.

Later, after she’d put his clothes in the wash—and whatever else he had in his backpack, another set of fatigues, crusted socks, undershorts that looked as if they’d been used to swab out a latrine—and left him alone in the shower with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo, she went to the pantry to dig out the egg noodles and sprinkle them over the pot where it was simmering on the stove so he could get something more substantial than diet veggie soup in him. As for the shampoo, he’d looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was—somehow, even out there in the woods, even while suffering diarrhea (giardia, that was what he insisted it was), he’d managed to keep his head shaved, and his face too. She’d even teased him about it as he stepped out of his clothes and handed them to her, saying, “I thought mountain men were allowed to grow beards,” but he didn’t respond because there was a whole lot else going on inside his head right then with his body full of parasites and the thinness of him and just the simple basic need of a good hot shower, but he did give her his partway grin and he was hard, hard right there before her, and he let her reach out a hand to his cock and give it a friendly tug before he shut the door and stepped into the shower.

Once he’d had his shower, he strolled into the kitchen and sat down at the table as if he’d been doing it every day of his life, grinning his strained grin and saying he was hungry enough to eat a hog or maybe a dog and they both looked at Kutya and burst out laughing. He was wearing her terrycloth robe and nothing else and it rode halfway up his arms and bunched in the shoulders. It was blue and it brought out the blue of his eyes, which was a nice contrast (she’d almost said pretty, or thought it) with his suntanned skin. The first thing he did, right off, was drink two beers, hardly pausing for breath, and then he had a glass of water and washed down a palmful of Imodium tabs. “Cool,” he said. “Niiiice,” drawing it out till the final
c
was like air hissing out of a balloon. He gave her a long penetrating look, his lips glistening with the water, half of which he’d spilled down the front of the robe. From the look he was giving her she’d expected him to say something suggestive, but he didn’t. “You got anything hard?” is what he said then. Or asked.

She was at the stove, stirring the soup, which was just about ready, and she set down the spoon, crossed the room to him and took hold of his arm, just above the rolled-up sleeve, and said, “Yeah, I’ve got you.”

But he stared right through her as if he hadn’t processed that at all, and she supposed he hadn’t, because he was Adam, no different from how he was a month ago, right there with you one minute and gone off the next. What he said was, “ ’Cause I’m all out of one fifty-one.”

So she poured him a glass of bourbon and he threw that down like a cowboy in one of the flickering westerns the old movie channel showed every other night. “More?” she asked, but the bottle was back on the counter behind her and she thought maybe he’d had enough, especially considering the purpose she had in mind once they’d finished supper and retired to the bedroom.

He held out the glass.

“Sure you don’t want to eat first? Put something on your stomach?”

Well, he didn’t. Or not yet, anyway. There was the glass framed in his hand, the nails dirty still despite the shower, half-moons of dirt worked in under them and up under the cuticles too, and she wondered if he’d sit still for a manicure at some point. She swung away to retrieve the bottle and poured for him, the neck kissing the glass, and when she tried to tip it back he just held her hand till the glass was full. “If you’re going to party,” she murmured, leaning into him so he could feel the weight of her against him, feel her heat and how much she wanted him and how glad she was that he was back, communication of the flesh and communion too, “then I’m going to pour myself another glass of wine.”

He’d always had a good appetite, burning up calories by the thousands out there in the woods keeping himself like a rock, but he outdid himself this time. He ate as if he was half-starved, and considering the problem he was having, she supposed he was, most of whatever he’d been eating probably going right through him. She made him a sandwich—smoked turkey and cheddar on brown bread, with mustard, mayo, fresh-sliced tomato and lettuce from the garden—and that was gone by the time he started on his second bowl of soup so she made him another one. If she didn’t eat a whole lot herself that night it was because she was watching him, this miracle of dynamic energy and concentrated movement that had blown back into her life, and because she was being careful about her weight and had to pick around the egg noodles. She did have three glasses of wine, though, and that made her feel as if she were floating free right along with him.

What did they talk about? Nothing much (thanks, Christa, for asking)—the woods, which for all she could get out of him, seemed to be full of trees; her latest victimization by the System; Stateline, Nevada, and Tahoe, did he like Tahoe? And giardia, of course. Giardia and shit. There was a cherry pie she’d bought in a moment of weakness yesterday and she set that out in front of him, and he seemed interested, but then the stomach pains got to
him and he disappeared into the bathroom. After a moment she pushed the pie away from her so as to resist temptation but then slid it back and had just the tiniest sliver, licking the sweet congealed cherry filling off her fingers before getting up to put on a CD and start cleaning up.

He was in there forever, doing what she couldn’t imagine, though it came to her that he was maybe just slumped over the toilet, in real pain, and she was remembering that time in Mexico with Roger when she’d got the
turista
and felt as though somebody was alternately running a screwdriver through her and pumping her gut full of swamp gas. When he did emerge, finally, he was naked and dripping with water from the shower, his second shower, and he had the Ziploc bag in one hand. Which he held up in front of his face and shook once or twice to make sure she was focused on it. “You got to take me to the doctor,” he said in his soft, soft voice, and he wouldn’t look at her, as if he was embarrassed by his own weakness.

“The doctor? I don’t know any doctor. And they wouldn’t be open now, anyway.”

“The emergency room. They have to like take anybody, right?”

Of course there was the whole rigamarole of insurance and who’s your primary-care doctor and fill out this form and this one too, but the surprise was that Adam actually had insurance through his father and they had his name and information in the computer from a previous visit or visits he’d made, one time apparently after he’d gotten bloodied in a scuffle at Piero’s and another after he’d driven his car through the fence at the playground, something he didn’t want to talk about but kept mentioning all the time, as if he’d padlocked it away and couldn’t remember the combination. The waiting room was packed to the walls with people who didn’t have health care, illegals, white trash, working stiffs who couldn’t afford rent let alone seeing a doctor because their two-year-old
was vomiting blood. It stank worse than any stable she’d ever been in and she had to thank her lucky stars she’d never been sick or she didn’t know what she would do. If things were the way they should be, the way they once were, with freemen on the land associating with each other on a by-need basis, then she could have just bartered with some doctor who kept horses and eliminated the middleman, the tax squeezer and the accountant and the whole shitty bureaucracy that had brought her here tonight. With Adam. Because he had giardia and they really didn’t have any other alternative.

They sat there for three and a half hours, him running to the bathroom every ten minutes and her paging through the magazines that were two years out of date and so encrusted with filth she’d be lucky if she didn’t get tetanus or something just from touching them, until, finally, they called his name and he went into the back room with the nurse and she watched the clock and got angrier by the minute. Or not angry, exactly. It was more like disappointment. She didn’t want to be here with the screaming babies and the old men with the bloody bandages wrapped around their bleached-out skulls and the illegals so sick with whatever it was they were like walking bags of infection. No, she wanted to be home. In her own house. With Kutya. And Adam.

Forty-five minutes more—they had to run his stool sample under the microscope to confirm the diagnosis he’d already made, and yes, it was giardia, very common in these parts, and that was the danger of drinking unchlorinated water, even from the purest-looking mountain stream—and then he was walking right by her in the waiting room as if he didn’t recognize her, locked in one of his trances, and she scurried across the room to catch up with him and take him by the arm and lead him out the door and into the parking lot. And that was where things got interesting.

Because there, right in front of them, pulled up neatly to the curb and with its gumball machine idly spinning, was a police cruiser, just sitting there, the engine running and the gasoline
the wage slaves had paid for—she’d paid for—cycling through it and spewing out the tailpipe as carbon monoxide to pollute the atmosphere even more than they’d already polluted it. There was no one in the cruiser. No one in sight. And what she was thinking, despite Adam and her hurry to get home, was that a chance had presented itself to her out of nowhere, a chance to get back at them, if not to get even, because she’d never get even. Adam walked right by it, the prescription they’d given him clutched in one hand, the bag of shit in the other, and why he didn’t just dump it she didn’t know.